How parents can help children fight Hinduphobia on US campuses

In our previous article , we explored the global geopolitical conflicts playing out in the microcosm of U.S. college campuses, and how America got there. In this article, we propose a set of ideas for Hindu parents, especially those living abroad but also in India, to recognise that what they might be passing on to their children as lessons in Hindu culture might not be enough to prepare them for the realities of life in college and after.

Dharmārthakāmāḥ kila tāta loke
Samīkṣitā dharma phalodayeṣu
Te tatra sarve syurasaṃśayaṃ me
Bhāryeva vaśyābhimatā suputrā
Yasmiṃstu sarve syurasanniviṣṭā
Dharmo yatassyāttadupakrameta
Dveṣyo bhavatyarthaparo hi loke
Kāmātmatā khalvapi na praśastā

—Rama explains to Lakshmana that choosing “artha” and “kama” over “dharma” leads to hatred and ruin (Ramayana, Ayodhya Kanda).

More from Opinion

Sergio Gor’s senate hearing signals the future of Indo-American ties How Trump’s ‘War on Drugs’ buildup against Venezuela has a hidden agenda

Here is a simple question for the parents of any child born between, say, the early 2000s and the present: have you given your children a sense of purpose about their lives?

If not, don’t worry, even if you haven’t, does it look like they have found a sense of purpose on their anyway?

If the answer to this is also no, even then you shouldn’t worry — because most of us frankly don’t quite know the answers either, and it is very rare that modern Hindus sit down and try to impart some kind of a philosophy of life doctrine to children.

Impact Shorts

More Shorts

How army remains Pakistan’s biggest business house

60 years on, why 1965 India–Pakistan war still matters

Instead, such questions are usually resolved not in explicit “religious” pedagogy but more informally over many interactions, events, and ups and downs in life.

Or maybe, in these modern times, the issue of purpose is not resolved at all. We go through life with “purpose” defined only to the extent of studies and jobs (“Artha” in Indic terms let us say), and if we are fortunate also in terms of our relationships, family duties and so on (“Kama” and “Dharma,” let us say). If we are “spiritually” or philosophically inclined, perhaps we also try to situate these questions within a larger understanding of ideas like “Moksha” perhaps.

But then, for a moment, picture the scenes from dozens of US college campuses of the past few days, pictures which include at least some Indian-descent children too. The protestors are clearly very purposeful – they have put their studies and maybe even careers on the line for a cause, however incorrect that cause may appear to some.

Now there are of course many more college students who are not joining in protests, and some might say these students are more focused on the actual purpose they should be focused on at this stage of their lives — which is their studies. But then, what are their sympathies? Are they hostile to the goals of the protestors, or broadly sympathetic to the cause of Palestine, Gaza, or whoever they believe is the victim of oppression today? Assuming some of them are, and some of them are not, still, what is their understanding of life? Are they merely getting through college and job because they need to have a leg to stand on in life, or do they view this as part of a broader cultural package, like having family, children, and so on? And of course, “having children” is no longer viewed as a universal purpose of life, as an  Indian businessman’s recent statement that he considered having children as a waste of his time, indicates.

Generational Change and the Definition of Purpose

On that note, we might ask these questions of our own generation too, that of the parents of today’s school and college children, people who are say, 1970-1990 born. Did we receive a “cultural package” about life, why we are born, what we are meant to do, and so on from our parents? If not in words, at least implicitly through example, perhaps? How much of that package have we imitated and transmitted to our children, and how much have we changed, compromised, or improvised on? These are all questions to be self-aware of, not in a judgmental way, but just to aid attention and analysis.

If we were to compare three or four successive parent-child generational dyads starting from say, the 1950s to the present, we can perhaps summarize how things changed in terms of just three words: materialism, consumerism, and ritual. The first two have increased exponentially, and the third has declined precipitously, in practice and in value, for peoples’ sense of purpose.

Let us take some concrete examples. First, materialism, or to use a more neutral idea, the notion of teaching children that the only important thing to secure in life is good marks, a good admission, and a good job. This was perhaps as much a concern for parents in the 1970s as it is for parents today. For many parents, a sense of parental duty is often seen as beginning and ending with providing for children until they are able to provide for themselves and then perhaps take care of their own children, and also their aging elders. This is an understandable part of the “parenting lesson” and we can leave it aside for now.

The second aspect has to do with consumption of goods, enjoyment, and what constitutes a good or pleasurable life. Here we can pinpoint dramatic cultural changes taking place in the parent-child relationship starting from the 1990s or so, when economic liberalization, the satellite TV boom, and advertising all shifted Indian notions of “conspicuous frugality” to the inevitable “conspicuous consumption.”

Sociologists writing about the rapid changes in the 1990s noted that even poor, working-class Indian parents had to splurge on colas and chocolates for their children so they could keep up their image with friends (and now, the currency of social status has shifted to smartphones and gadgets). If that was the change among the poor, imagine the change among the rich or new-rich (of whom there were many). The old ideals of austerity and not flaunting wealth in a poor country went out of the window in 1990s India. Even in Bollywood movies, the codes for depicting wealthy characters changed. In older movies, a big hall with a sweeping staircase was enough to say “this is a wealthy family.” In post 1990s movies, wealth had to be specified in the script with specific figures about “net worth,” defined in nothing less than “thousands of crores” always. In the United States too, I suspect, there was a bit of a change in how Indians related to wealth and its display around this time, with people becoming more reckless about displaying it as the number of Indian immigrants, temples, Bollywood parties, and opportunities for status-signalling grew.

Parents’ Idea of Purpose is Stuck in ‘Artha’

Before we turn to the third idea, that of rituals, let us relate these two trends back to our main concern in this article — and that is the idea of “purpose” as taught by one generation to another.

From birth until adulthood, any child hears one overwhelming message from parents (and perhaps teachers and other elders): you are defined by your marks, your admission rank, your college, your job, your employer, and your “package.” How harshly and monotonously one hears it of course may vary from family to family. At the most intense level, we might remember the character of the father in the movie Taare Zameen Par, chugging along like a human-machine on his job, being followed closely in his footsteps by his successful older son, and of course, totally unable to understand the humanity of the movie’s “star,” his younger son.

This sort of “materialism” of course does not stop even after children have grown up and got the “package” they wanted; it shows up all over again in that other social institution many Indians still rely on, which the arranged or facilitated marriage. When it comes to modern matchmaking, anxious parents perhaps rely less now on family ties, personalities, and other subjective insights perhaps than on the “objective” universal “free-market” metrics of economic worth in matchmaking. It is of course to their credit that many young couples manage to wriggle out sometimes in spite of this myopia from parents.

Peer-Defined ‘Purpose’ is Stuck in ‘Kama’

This leads us into the second major cultural force in shaping and reshaping a sense of purpose in life. If parents and teachers have been drilling into children that who they are is defined by marks and job packets, children are growing up with a different idea of who they are or what they are defined by — and this comes of course from the consumer culture, which includes celebrities, sports, film stars, consumer brands, TV shows, and the growing plethora of recreational and lifestyle choices available to Indians after 1991.

Through TV, and now through social media, children grow up negotiating a sense of who they are through consumer choices. It is not enough to simply own certain objects, but to also feel a sense of worth perhaps through the stories that are woven around certain products by advertising and marketing geniuses.

If we look at some signature advertising slogans and themes from the 1980s to the present, we can see some very relevant trends that might explain how a younger audience’s sense of self and purpose is being shaped. In the 1980s and 1990s, the middle class family was celebrated for its practicality in the iconic ads of the time ( Lalita-ji, Maggi Noodles, for example) and of course, for symbolizing India’s cultural diversity (Hamara Bajaj). Since 2014 (or a few years later), there has been an increase in ads which take the theme of “diversity” into a new zone of almost militant posturing, depicting the “majority” cultural community as perpetually bigoted and prejudiced against minorities and people who are “different” (the famous tea-brand ads from a few years ago) and Hindu festivals as revolting, polluting, or regressive (ads for bathroom cleaning liquids, air purifiers, and so on).

This trend in Indian advertising also mirrors the direction in American advertising strategies particularly since the election of Donald Trump in 2016. It started in 2017 with the Superbowl ads and the  much-publicised imagery of the “Drag Queen and Burkha woman” side-by-side as a marker of superior Western moral and political sensibility among consumers. Of course, this trend was not only in the relatively entertaining side of pop culture, but also in academia, law, and corporate training. By 2020, the discourse on diversity moved from being about simple matters like respect and equal treatment to more assertive ideas like “Anti-Racism” and public displays of atonement for “Whiteness” like washing peoples’ feet, “taking the knee,” and so on.

Strangely enough, the fact that much of the supposedly progressive messaging in the US was coming from big capitalist companies was hardly criticized by Marxist professors and scholars, but fell instead to free-market supporters like Vivek Ramaswamy to condemn (see his book Woke, Inc. for example).

Given the absence of alternate viewpoints for students in schools and colleges, it is unlikely though that youth can find credible and compelling arguments that can help them question the premise of the “causes” that have been big business projects now. In the case of U.S. Hindu families, the effects of the assembly-line movement of their children’s minds from parents to professors is quite clear now. Parents fail to teach children they have a purpose bigger than getting grades and jobs. Peers and schools and colleges then take over that role in teaching the same children they can be bigger and better than their jobs – they can be protestors!

Remove ‘Ritual’ from Dharma, and ‘Protest’ Becomes Dharma

Now, for the third and perhaps most crucial dimension in the Hindu parent-child generational dyad: the practice of traditional rituals.

It might be fair to say that there has been a dramatic fall in the amount of rituals that are practiced by Hindu parents, or by children, especially in the West. There is a bit of “cultural identity” encouragement, sure, such as dance or music classes, weekend spirituality lessons, and some temple visits. But then, one does not see the “ritual” holding the power it did in anyone’s life as it did two or three generations ago. At best, it exists alongside a larger project of designing events as entertainment or consumer-lifestyle-identity statement (to cite the most obvious example, the whole circus around wedding rituals like the “kanya daanam”) but over two generations, the space to think of the ritual as the paramount duty has obviously declined in Hindu families

It is perhaps less dramatic in decline in India, but the diaspora’s choices and priorities are quite obvious. One example that comes to mind is that while diaspora parents encourage their child’s cultural education classes until, say class eight or nine, they inevitably signal to children that now the “materialism” (exams, grades, admissions) part alone is important.

Interestingly, neither parents nor of course children seem to rely on the “ritual universe” as earlier generations did for even “material” results! In a 1980s childhood in India, for instance, parents had absolute “belief” that along with entrance exam coaching, children also needed to fulfil whatever pilgrimages and pujas had been recommended by trusted elders or jyotisha experts to ensure success in exams. Maybe this happens a bit with families still living in India, but in the US, somehow the gods don’t hold the power they did anymore to ensure exam and college admissions success – and that is the message the children are growing up with from their parents’ priorities!

It is not of course, like parents are telling their children not to pray to Ganesha or Saraswati, or sneering at the gods altogether (maybe some are). The problem is that they are now content with a simple, one-word swap for all of the experiences that children in earlier times grew up with such as observing full-blown traditional rituals, festivals, pilgrimages, and so on.

That one-word is, of course, the idea of being “good.” When all that parents can offer children by way of explanation for why their ancestors observed certain traditions generation after generation (and “why” is a historically new question as well), is the alternative magic formula “just be good,” it gives them, in a way, a blank-slate that anyone in the future can write on. Sooner or later, the idea that you don’t need gods to be “good,” catches on. And then, once you have removed from your attention the gods that make the sanatana dharma both sanatana and dharma, you are left to populate your definition of “good” with whatever is the current fashion in your big STEM-MBA money-endowed upper class lifestyle circles: support the fight against Brahminical Savarnas, Zionism, Modi, Hindutva, and so on.

And of course, the biggest current fashion of all — support the fight against those old-fashioned creatures called parents, and the small fellows who made them that way, their children.  The biggest reworking of the idea of “purpose” in the last few decades and over the last couple of generations might well be the rise in antipathy towards the idea that we have an obligation in time to our ancestors expressed through, well, the way nature thought it’s done, which is — children. Even that, or maybe, especially that, is now in the cross-hairs of both the “materialists” and the “consumerists” who view having children as a waste of time which is rightfully yours to enjoy as you will because … “YOLO,” you know.

Vamsee Juluri is Professor of Media Studies, University of San Francisco. He has authored several books,  including ‘Rearming Hinduism: Nature, Hinduphobia and the Return of Indian Intelligence’ (Westland, 2015). C Raghothama Rao is a writer, podcaster and YouTuber. The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.